Wednesday, November 5, 2008

Capital Plan Announced

The City's five year capital plan for school construction has been released. There are only 17,000 new school seats despite generous State matching funds for school construction. An additional 8,000 seats left undone in the prior plan will be carried over to the new plan. In Manhattan only District 2 receives new capacity -- 3,046 seats at a cost of $352 million over five years. But because much of this capacity was promised in the current plan and has just been pushed back, the true incremental figures are only 1,801 seats at a cost of $194 million. The bulk of these new seats will only being ready in 2015 or later.

Class size targets in the new plan will not adhere to the City's Contracts for Excellence goals of 20 K-3 and 23 otherwise. Instead the targets will be class sizes of 28 in grades 4-8 and 30 for high schools.